OSSR: Dragon Kings

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 10:23 am

shadzar wrote:Look Frank

I am not Frank.

shadzar wrote:If you want a real kick in the nuts by a mule to you argument....

H4-Throne of Bloodstone (1988)
AD&D 2nd Edition (1989)

So that Forgotten Realms adventure is a 1e edition rules product, not even 2nd edition. Just look at the logo how it is missing the "2nd Edition" like all early (prior to 1995) 2nd edition materials.

Oh zing! You got me!

Apart from the fact I never even mentioned 2nd edition, I just said AD&D because I knew it was 1st edition. So that entire tirade was meaningless. I guess that's what I get for reading a shadzar post.

LAGO wrote:Damn, level 100? I don't think that 2E D&D even had level caps for most of their spells. The blurb on wikipedia said that there's no way that a wizard could take out a 100,000-strong city full of demons directly, but it still feels like there should be some way to do so if you're packing that high of a caster level.

I don't know, I don't seem to remember much scaling apart from damage on spells in 2e.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 10:44 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Damn, level 100? I don't think that 2E D&D even had level caps for most of their spells. The blurb on wikipedia said that there's no way that a wizard could take out a 100,000-strong city full of demons directly, but it still feels like there should be some way to do so if you're packing that high of a caster level.

Level caps were phased in in 2nd edition for some spells. 1st Edition AD&D didn't have any caps at all that I can recall.

The big issue is that you still don't get many spells per day. And spells don't really scale in size, just in power. So as an immortals level Magic User, you could use a fireball or even a magic missile to insta-kill Jubilex, but neither of those spells do much outside a rather small area. Lightning bolts in 2nd edition start at 40 feet by 10 feet or 80 feet by 5 feet when you get them at level 5, and when you're a level 25 Dragon King... they are still 40x10 or 80x5. You can make them start farther away from you if you want (our 25th level Dragon King can begin the Lightning Bolt up to 790 feet away from himself), but the actual damaging area is still just 16 battlemat squares. And that's assuming we're using modern 5'x5' squares, in 1st edition they liked to throw around much larger squares indeed, rendering Lightning Bolt into something not unlike a crossbow bolt in a lot of instances.

While Dragon Kings does produce some of those "Psionic Enchantments" to do things to large areas, they are mostly pretty disappointing and in any case take weeks to prepare, so they won't actually do you much good. A mage could basically incinerate hundreds of people, but then he was out of spells. For larger conflicts, there really wasn't much anything any character of any level could do. Which is why you were supposed to whip out the BATTLESYSTEM™ and fuck around with armies. Not that people actually did that, but that is what you were supposed to do.

-Username17

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 1:30 pm

Spell accumulation in AD&D was slower than in 3.x, and there were no bonus spells for wizards. When you reached level 29 (the end of the Spells By Level chart), you would have about the same number of spells as a 3.x 20th level wizard -- fewer, if the 3.x wizard were optimized to even a modest degree.

A 100th level wizard would have exactly 71 more hit points than a 29th level wizard. He would do absurd levels of damage with any spell that varied by level. But the actual spells would be the same, his saving throws would be the same, his hit tables (if he cared, which he probably didn't) would be the same, his spells would be no harder to save against, and so on. And a 100d6 fireball is stopped by a Globe of Invulnerability just like a 5d6 fireball.

Now, if you want to talk about the Immortals Set for BECMI, that's a whole different ball game. I have a copy in my attic somewhere, but I don't remember it well enough to say more than that it's more its own thing that happens to touch on D&D rules at some points, rather than an actual expansion of the D&D rules in the way that Epic aspired to be.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:44 pm

Would you say this is a feature, and not a bug, in the sense that a large enough horde of barbarians actually can topple a magical kingdom ruled by a handful of high level casters?

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:19 pm

Throne of Bloodstone might be a fun OSSR.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:53 pm

OgreBattle wrote:Would you say this is a feature, and not a bug, in the sense that a large enough horde of barbarians actually can topple a magical kingdom ruled by a handful of high level casters?

Oh, it's definitely a bug. The magic kingdoms actually aren't supposed to be toppled by barbarians, and they aren't. The thing is that high level Wizards are supposed to put together their own magic armies. Your armies are bullshit compared to the armies of the Dragon Kings, because those armies are full of Templars, Golems, and Beast Men. But there aren't any rules for that shit. You can become a Dragon King in your own right, but whatever magic army you get to solidify your rule is 100% magic teaparty. Because there are rules for high level Fighters to train up units of militia to harder core units of militia (but I have no idea how much better they get, because that is expressed in terms of BATTLESYSTEM™ stands, and I have no idea what that means). But the creation and cultivation of magic armies is completely in the hands of DM adjudication.

This is one place where ACKS is way ahead of 2nd edition AD&D. If you're going to make "a wizard did it" be a major source of monsters in your setting, you sort of need to actually have rules for Wizards to do it.

-Username17

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 4:55 pm

Ancient History wrote:Throne of Bloodstone might be a fun OSSR.

I have H2-H4 if someone wants to do the series. Or else I'll do it myself once I get through the stack of other things I kind of want to OSSR.

FrankTrollman wrote:You can become a Dragon King in your own right, but whatever magic army you get to solidify your rule is 100% magic teaparty.

What's really kind of a kick in the crotch is that there are totally rules for how Templars work (they're a fucking PC class in Dark Sun, after all), and it would honestly not be that big a deal to have rules for how Dragon Kings accumulate them. But not only do they not do that, they further piss in the Cheerios by specifically mandating that Dragon Kings who aren't one of the Original Champions cannot grant spells to Templars at all.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Mar 14, 2014 1:14 am

How do Templars work anyways, are they more like paladins or clerics or fighter/mages

ScottS · Post by **ScottS** » Fri Mar 14, 2014 2:08 am

Clerics (with less spell slots but a larger list).

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Fri Mar 14, 2014 7:20 am

Red_Rob wrote:
shadzar wrote:Look Frank
I am not Frank.

shadzar wrote:If you want a real kick in the nuts by a mule to you argument....

H4-Throne of Bloodstone (1988)
AD&D 2nd Edition (1989)

So that Forgotten Realms adventure is a 1e edition rules product, not even 2nd edition. Just look at the logo how it is missing the "2nd Edition" like all early (prior to 1995) 2nd edition materials.
Oh zing! You got me!

Apart from the fact I never even mentioned 2nd edition, I just said AD&D because I knew it was 1st edition. So that entire tirade was meaningless. I guess that's what I get for reading a shadzar post.

well Frank likes to confuse the accessories witht he edition itself, so I jsut call all other people that do that now Frank.

Lago asked about 2nd edition, and your reply to me was about what I was saying to him/her about 2nd edition, so when you did not declare a change of edition in what you were meaning, how is anyone else supposed to know you were NOT talking about 2nd edition and the string of posts you jumped into was talking about?

AD&D encompasses 2 editions for most, and even 3rd to others. so you need to be more clear what you mean then if generic AD&D, 1e, 2e. so next time make sure to read the post that you are replying too to make sure there isnt an edition listed and it will cause less confusion in the future.

FrankTrollman wrote:1st Edition AD&D didn't have any caps at all that I can recall.

Do you mean dwarf can only be level X for class Y, or levels 1~20 are all that exist?

1e, once you reached a level that was printed on the class table in the PHB, you just needed Z xp to reach each level beyond that.

ex:

PHB pg 20 wrote:225,000 experience points per level for each additional level beyond the 11 th.

but then, where it stopped was when you got tired of playing or ran out of things to fight. so some games that began in 1979 are still going.